Why Claude Code Skills Don't Trigger (And How to Fix Them in 2026)

Claude Code skills frequently fail to trigger due to three root causes: token budget overflow that silently drops skill descriptions when exceeding the ~15,000-character system prompt budget, YAML formatting issues with multi-line block scalars, and a third cause (truncated in source). The primary fix for token overflow is setting SLASH_COMMAND_TOOL_CHAR_BUDGET=30000, while YAML issues are resolved by keeping descriptions on single logical lines with prettier-ignore comments.